Fig. 312. Caravaggio. The Card Players.—Dresden.
Both at Rome and Naples swaggering Caravaggio had enormous success. His heads, we read, brought more than other men’s compositions. He boasted himself the greatest painter of all time, and was often believed. From his swarthy tones his entire school took the name, the Tenebrists. His experiments in interior and artificial lighting were widely imitated, and again ultimately passed into recent Impressionism. His rejection of noble form in favor of what one sees, and of decorative color in favor of natural, was the sharpest possible challenge of the Renaissance style, and outside of Italy where the noble tradition was only incipient did much to arrest its diffusion. From the point of view of modern art there are few more important figures. From the point of view of art broadly he has his serious limitations. Most damaging is his waiver of civilization, he looks at low life not with the eyes of a detached artist but with those of a ruffian. He did not have the intelligence to live up to his own formula. Annibale Carracci was once looking at Caravaggio’s Judith, and, being pressed for an opinion, remarked that it was “too natural.” He spoke as an admirer of the grand style. A modern realist would make the far more radical criticism that Caravaggio is never natural enough. He really makes no close study of the subtleties of natural appearance or of the actual refinements of illumination, but rather substitutes for the old stately formulas a new, more ugly, and less studied formula of his own. Logically he should have gone forward with Ribera and Velasquez to a real investigation of appearances. But his logic was only that of scorn, and it would doubtless have somewhat compensated him for a sordid and premature end, could he have forseen that his biographers would credit him with the ruin of Italian painting.
Through Ribera, Caravaggio’s influence passes to the Neapolitan, Salvator[[89]] Rosa (1615–1673). With greater vivacity and better color Salvator repeats the character studies and tavern scenes, also bringing the proletarian mood into mythology. He painted battle pieces of real ferocity. He was an irascible, vain and capricious person, proud of being so; a scorner of his own patrons and of the bourgeois generally; a maker of epigrams, and a writer of satires. His specialty is the sinister and picturesque, and he practices it with gusto and ability, Figure [313]. Salvator is the real discoverer of the picturesque, the first enthusiast for the savage aspects of nature. Likewise he was one of the first artists to study effects—sunsets, storms, mists, and whirling clouds. He excursioned in the Abruzzo, equally savoring its crags, torrents, and forests, and its ferocious banditti. His letters on these wanderings are among the first and most important documents of the modern cult of nature. He writes: “You have saddened me by giving me the news of your having been in Garfagna, and having rejoiced in the savagery of that country so congenial to my nature.... To be merely reminded of it brings the tears to my eyes.” Again he writes from the Adriatic Apennines: “I have been two weeks in continual travel and the trip is much more strange and picturesque than that of Florence, beyond comparison so, since there is such an extravagant mixture of the rough and cultivated, of the level and precipitous that nothing more could be desired for the satisfaction of the eye.”... “At Terni, four miles off the road I saw the famous falls of the Velino, a thing to haunt and possess the most insatiable mind because of its horrid beauty. To see a river that plunges straight down a mountain for half a mile, and sends up its foam as high!” Much of the stormy and energetic character of such scenes is transcribed in the best landscapes of Salvator, Figure [314]. In their age they evoked little following. But these forests, cascades, evening seaports, and ruined sites were freely bought by the English, greatly admired and had their part in producing the literary enthusiasm for wild nature in the eighteenth century.
Fig. 313. Salvator Rosa. Landscape with figures.—Pitti.
Salvator avows his “extravagant genius,” is driven by the lust for novelty, is a modern and romantic spirit. Withal he was a man of capacity and taste with an open-minded understanding of quite alien merit. “Here, we esteem M. Poussin,” he writes in October, 1665, “more than any one else in the world.”
Poussin could never have returned the compliment. His approbation was for Raphael, the Carracci and Domenichino. Indeed a chief glory of the Bolognese Eclectics was that their critical method sufficed to nurture so classic a spirit as Poussin’s and so to establish the academic tradition for Northern Europe.
Fig. 314. Salvator Rosa. Landscape.—Pitti.
Though the Eclectic movement is properly associated with the cousins Lodovico and Annibale Carracci,[[90]] it somewhat antecedes them. The impetus comes from Flanders with the painter of Antwerp, Denis Calvert, who came to Bologna late in the sixteenth century and founded an art school. Like all the better educated Flemings, he represented a profound nostalgia for Renaissance grandeur, and also a certain detachment from the particular Italian artists who had embodied the ideal of grandezza. Such a man is, perforce, an eclectic, studying widely the methods of his great predecessors and seeking to assimilate in his own art their various perfections. Besides, methods of comparative study which had formerly been extremely difficult if not impossible were now easy. Casts were available of the antique marbles, fairly faithful engravings were at hand for all the great painters. It is significant that both the Carracci were reproductive engravers. Denis Calvert was no genius, but a prudent and sagacious artist who made the most of a slender endowment. His critical and assimilative spirit passed over to his best pupils. Their reform, unlike Caravaggio’s, was not revolutionary, but based on a careful restudy of the grand style, which they had never wavered in venerating.